Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of the News World, I'm really pleased
to welcome my guests, Max Boot. He's joining me today
to discuss his new book on President Reagan, entitled Reagan,
His Life and Legend, which is already a New York
Times bestseller. There are a lot of biographies about Reagan,
but I want to share with you some of the
(00:25):
reviews Max's book has received, just to give you a
flavor of how good this book is. It has been
acclaimed as quote the definity biography by The New Yorker
Magisterial and splendid by The Washington Post, and a book
that quote stands out for its deep research, lucid prose,
(00:46):
and command of its subjects, broad political and social context
by the New York Times. Max Boot is the Jane
ja Orpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for The Washington Post,
and a best selling author. His previous biography, The Road
(01:07):
Not Taken Edward Lansdale and the American Tragy in Vietnam,
was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for
the twenty nineteen Pulitzer Prize. Biography Max, Welcome and thank you.
(01:30):
For joining me on Newsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's a pleasure to be here with you, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Before we get into the new book about Reagan, I
do want to congratulate you on being a finalist for
the twenty nineteen Politic Serprize and Biography for your book
The Road Not Taken Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy
in Vietnam. Will you briefly talk both about the book
in what it was like to be a finalist?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Thank you for those kind words. The book was about
this legendary COVID operative. He was an Air Force officer
but worked for the CIA, helped to defeat a communist
insurgency in the Philippines in the late forties early fifties,
and then helped to create the state of South Vietnam
and was a major player in the early years of
America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and then ultimately a
(02:19):
bystander to the tragedy that the war turned into, which
he had warned against and became a prophet who was
not heeded, but a fascinating story and telling the story
of Edward Landsday was kind of my gateway drug for
writing biography because before that, I had written these big,
sprawling military histories. But I really enjoyed focusing on at
(02:39):
Lansdale's life and not just writing about his professional activities,
but also about his personal life. There was a great
love story at the heart of the book. He had
a passionate love affair with a Filipino woman named Pat Kelly,
whom he eventually, after his first wife died, he married
Pat Kelly. And so I found all these love letters
that Pat and Ed had exchanged and gave me a
(03:01):
really amazing advantage point on too at Lansdale's inner life.
And so it was a fascinating experience to write that book,
and I was very honored and privileged to be a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And then so as I
was thinking about, you know, what would I do next,
what would I do for an encore? I decided that
I really enjoyed doing biography and I wanted to do
(03:22):
that rather than return to these big sprang military histories.
And so that's how I wound up writing about the
life of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I think your book on Lansdale is important because it
seems to me that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, we
had learned none of the lessons of Vietnam that, in fact,
the Lansdale approach, if anything, would have worked, it was
much closer to the Lansdale model than what we actually did.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, I certainly agree with that.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, and yet it's almost impossible to get our military
bureaucracy either to learn the lessons or to rethink how
they do things. It's just something I'm actually writing on
right now that is astonishing, the resistance to rethinking.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
That's a great and important topic. And Ed Lansdale was
one of those guys who was a complete maverick who
was really anathema at depending on in frankly anathema at
the CIA as well, because he was somebody who was
always at odds with the bureaucracy and just determined to
do his own thing. And so the people who were
the skillful bureaucratic players really hated him and finally pushed
(04:24):
him out of a senior policy role. I think very
much to America's detriment. I think that is as I'm
sure you're finding what you're writing now. I mean, I
think that's a huge issue today, where you're seeing how
warfare has transformed with drones and you know, AI and
all these other systems, and yet we're still largely operating
a military based on mid twentieth century platforms, and it's
(04:45):
very hard to make that transition.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Well, and you and I are talking just a few
hours after he is really showed a very sophisticated approach
to a kind of cyber war that had devastating consequences.
In fact, that our military has almost no capacity for
thinking about those kind of profoundly different approaches to impacting
(05:11):
your opponent.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, I think that should be a wake up call
for our military and multiple levels, including thinking about how
do they safeguard their communications devices and how do they
safeguard their supply chains, because they're going to be very
clever adversaries out there. They're going to be thinking about
how to exploit our vulnerabilities as the Israelis exploited has
Belaw's vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
So when you decided you would continue doing biographies, what
led you to pick Reagan?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Nald Reagan was such a consequential president, not just for
the country and the world, but for me personally growing
up in the nineteen eighties. He really shaped my worldview,
made me a conservative and a Republican and obviously changed
the world in so many ways. And yet when I
was starting this book more than a decade ago, I
came to the conclusion, while there are many books about
(05:59):
Ron Reagan, including many good books about Reagan, there was
not one definitive, objective biography. And so that is what
I set out to do, to produce a book that
looked at Reagan in a balanced and fair way, that
looked at his achievements as well as his failures, at
his successes and setbacks, his strengths and weaknesses, and really
to present an objective view that I think you can
(06:22):
only really achieve decades after somebody has left the political scene.
And so I was delighted to see, as you quoted earlier,
that the New Yorker said, it's the definitive biography, because
that's exactly what I was aiming to do.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
You now have a range of information that literally wasn't available.
And how much did that enrich and deepen your understanding
of Reagan.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It was tremendously helpful. I think I kind of wrote
this at kind of a sweet point in history, because,
on the one hand, I was writing at a time
when a lot of new archival information has opened up
a lot of documents that were one secret are now
available for viewing at the Reagan Library and CEMEE Valley, California.
But at the same time, I was starting this early
(07:04):
enough that there were a lot of people who really
knew Reagan and worked with them very closely, who were
still around to be interviewed. And sadly, a lot of
those folks that I talked to at the start of
this book project are no longer with us, you know,
folks like George Schultz or Colin Pewell or Bud McFarland
or so many others. So you know they're going to
be Certainly, future historians are going to be able to
read even more documents because more stuff gets declassified every year,
(07:27):
but they're not going to be able to sit down
as I did with a lot of the key players
and actually talk to them and to gain their personal perspective.
What made this research process, which was very lengthy but
made it very fulfilling, was that combination of those two things,
or the ability to tap into new documents, but also
the ability to tap into old memories and to talk
to people who were there and could give their perspectives,
(07:48):
some of whom I'm delighted to say are still very
much around.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Were your views or your assessment of Reagan changed as
you did all this research.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, absolutely. And I didn't go in to this with
a lot of preconceptions other than my one desire was
kind of follow the evidence and see what would shake out.
And one of the things that I concluded was that
he was both more ideological and more pragmatic than I
had realized or I think that most people realize. And
what I discovered was, for example, in terms of his ideology,
(08:19):
I mean, he had gone pretty far to the right
by the early nineteen sixties, having grown up as a
New Deal Democrat, he had become a very conservative Republican
who was warning that, you know, Medicare and Medicaid was
going to lead to the loss of freedom in America,
who said in his famous Time for Choosing speech in
nineteen sixty four that the Party of Jefferson, Jackson and
Cleveland was now marching under the banners of Marx, Lennon
(08:41):
and Stalin, and so all this kind of very hardcore
rhetoric which people tend to forget about if they remember
him as kind of a grandfatherly president, but he was
really an ideological crusader for a large part of his life.
But that led to unrealistic expectations or unfair expectations of
what would happen once he was actually elected. A lot
of people expected, based on his very Goldwater type rhetoric,
(09:04):
that he would turn out to be a very far
right leader as governor of California and as President of
the United States. And he really up into those expectations
because I think he showed that he had a massive
pragmatic streak and a willingness to do deals, a willingness
to pivot to the center, and his record I think,
as both governor and president, kind of defied easy ideological labels.
(09:26):
I mean, he was certainly coming from the conservative perspective
in general. But you know, he signed his first budget
is governor of California, had the largest spending plan and
tax increase in California history. And his governor of California,
he also signed one of the most liberal abortion laws
in the country, signed a very tough gun control bill,
and then, as you know, President of the United States,
(09:47):
he also he signed big as you know, you were there,
you were in Congress at the time, and he signed
big tax cuts, but he also signed some tax increases,
and in nineteen eighty six he signed legislation that legalized
millions of un documented immigrants. And finally, I think, in
some ways his most important achievement and most unexpected achievement,
he worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to peacefully in the Cold War,
(10:09):
which is not necessarily something you would expect from somebody
who'd been this staunch anti communist his entire life, opponent
of Dayton, advocate of confrontation with the Kremlin. And yet
he saw that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader,
and so he was able to put his preconceptions aside
and to work very pragmatically to reduce the risk of
nuclear conflict in the conflict between our two countries. I
(10:32):
was kind of surprised to see the extent of which
his record was actually very pragmatic and much less ideological
than a lot of people thought.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Do you do an interesting analogy that it took about
thirty years for Eisenhower to re emerge as a really
subtle and sophisticated user of power, And in a sense
we're in the same cycle now with Reagan, in that
when you look back, the number of things achieved, as
you point out, particularly the dance he did with Gorbachev,
(11:03):
is so astonishing and I think so unpredictable in nineteen
eighty To what extent do you think, Margaret Thatcher's initial
intervention saying, you know, I think we can deal with
this guy changed Reagan's view and in sense changed the
course of history.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I think that was tremendously important, because Thatcher was one
of the world leaders. He was closest to and had
the most respect for the other one being Brian maul
Rooney than the Prime Minister of Canada. But the fact
that Thatcher actually met Gorbachev before he took over a
Soviet leader and concluded, this is a guy we can
do business with, and she actually flew to the United
States and went to Camp David until President Reagan that
(11:42):
and obviously he had great respect for Thatcher as a
fellow conservative anti communist, so hearing Thatcher say that impressed him.
But I would say that there was still a lot
of doubt and uncertainty in Reagan's mind prior to his
first summit with Gorbachev in Geneva in nineteen eighty five,
because he was hearing from a lot of people, including
Defense Secretary cast For Weinberger and Bob Gates at the CIA,
(12:04):
and many others were suggesting to him that Gorbachev was
just a classic communists, no different from the rest. And
you know, he was trying to snooker us and take
us for a ride, and we had to keep our
guard up, and so he didn't really know what to expect.
I mean, he was kind of hopeful of progress, but
he wasn't sure it was going to happen. And then
I think it was really that summat those two days
in Geneva, I think really changed Dragan's mind and changed
(12:26):
the course of world history because is you know, Jack Matlock,
who was his aide at the NSC and later ambassador
to Moscow, said, you know, after Geneva, Reagan did not
need an intelligence assessment to tell him that he could
work with Gorbachev. He felt it instinctively because he had
established that personal rapport. And it was just fascinating to
read the transcripts of their meetings in Geneva, which are
(12:48):
now available, and you know, especially interesting to see like
their after dinner conversations, not just their negotiating sessions, but
their dinner conversations, you know, where Reagan said something along
the lines of imagine, if Earth was going to be
invaded by aliens, we would all come together in defense
of the planet. So we have to come together and
basically analogizing nuclear weapons to aliens that we all had
(13:10):
to come together to defend against. And I think that
made a powerful impression on Gorbachev. And you know, I
think at one point Gorbachev dropped a reference to Jesus Christ,
and I think that made a powerful impression on Reagan
because he came away thinking, oh, you know, maybe Gorbachev
was a closet religious believer. And so they established these
bonds in Geneva that I think proved incredibly consequential over
(13:32):
the next few years.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Would you say that the opening up of the Soviet
Union and the encouraging of Gorbachev into glass snowst and
perastroika and arms deals, is that Reagan's biggest single contribution
as a historic figure.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
I don't think Reagan really caused the Gorbachev reforms. He
certainly followed a confrontational policy with the Soviet Union in
the first term, and you know, building up defense spending,
launching sdi hating the Afghan Mujahedeen and Polish Solidarity and
so forth and so on. But I don't think there's
any real indication prior to Gorbachev coming to power in
eighty five that the Soviet Union was going to break
(14:28):
apart or was going to crack under the strain. And
you see today that there are lots of communist regimes
in Cuba, or Vietnam, North Korea, China that have survived
since the nineteen eighties, and a lot of them looked
much weaker at the time than the Soviet Union. So
I think the real change was Gorbachev coming to power.
And I don't think that his comrades on the Pallapiro
knew at the time how radical reformer he would turn
(14:50):
out to be. And I don't think even Gorbachev himself, frankly,
knew how radical reformer he would turn out to be.
But I think Gorbachev was a very unusual character in
that he was sewn. He rose to the top of
this dictatorial system, but then largely lost faith in that dictatorship,
and he actually wanted to reform the Soviet Union, make
life better for Soviet citizens, and he didn't want to
(15:11):
break up the Soviet Union. But basically, I think that
was the unintended consequence of his reforms of Glasnost and
Peristroika led to the crackup of the Soviet Union. So
I don't think Reagan caused Gorbachev to come to power.
I don't think he caused Gorbachev's reforms, But I think
what he did do was incredibly important, which was he
recognized that Gorbachev was actually trying to change things, and
(15:31):
he worked with Gorbachev to lower tensions and make it
possible for Gorbachev to sideline the hardliners in the Kremlin
and to encourage him and gave him kind of top
cover and support from the American President, which was a
very powerful thing for Gorbachev to continue down this path
of reform. So I think his contribution isn't what it's
often made out to me, but it was a very
(15:51):
significant contribution and very much to his credit that he
did that.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
The feeling we got in that period, because that was
in Congress, was that the inability of the system to
tell Gorbachev the truth about the nuclear event at Chernobyl
and the fact that the only accurate information you could
get was from Swedish and Norwegian television really shook him
(16:15):
about how deeply corrupt the system had become, and that
if you didn't have very substantial reforms, it just wasn't
gonna work.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. But I think
it would have been another story if somebody else had
taken over the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty five. I mean,
imagine if somebody like Putin had taken over the Soviet
Union eighty five. I mean, it's impossible to imagine that
he would wind up liberalizing or worrying about the fate
of the Soviet people. He would probably just crack down
even harder, and you could have had a tenement square
(16:46):
massacre in the Soviet Union as you had in Beijing.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
You talk about Reagan personally from the standpoint that you
attended his final campaign rally in eighty four. Looking back,
what was that like?
Speaker 2 (17:00):
It was an awesome event, even though I was roasting
in the sun for several hours before the Great Man appeared.
But I was, you know, a huge fan of Ronald
Reagan in those days. And my family came from the
Soviet Union in nineteen seventy six, So like a lot
of immigrats from communist countries. I tended to gravitate towards
the right side of the political spectrum, and I was
(17:20):
really thrilled when Reagan called out the evil Empire and
talked about human rights abuses, said mister Gorbachev turned down
this wall all the rest of it. And so I
was like a lot of people at the time. I
think you remember, I think Reagan really made conservatism cool
in the nineteen eighties, and I was certainly a young
person at the time, and I was just thrilled. And
he gave it was I mean, it was a very
(17:42):
perfunctory campaign speech. It was like probably twenty minutes or something.
But he always had that horror about him. He was
always so good natured, so good humored, always had just
the right joke to open up and to establish that
rapport with his audience. And as you know, just watching
Reagan speak was always kind of a masterclass communicating.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I think part of it was because he was a
movie star, and part of it was because he'd learned
how to carry himself as a movie star war I
know from my own perspective as a junior member of Congress,
when he walked in the room you were clearly dealing
with the charismatic figure, and he seemed effortless in the
way he did it.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I remember Stu Spencer, who was his longtime political consultantating
back to nineteen sixty six, told me something funny where
he said like Reagan was the only guy where he
would seem like in the green room getting ready to
go on and give a speech. And he felt like
Reagan was almost like growing before his eyes. It was
like a transformation, like Clark Camp was becoming Superman. He
was like assuming this aura because, as you know, I'm
(18:44):
sure from dealing with him personally, he was actually a
fairly quiet, introverted person. He was not actually a glad hander.
He was not all that outgoing. I mean, well, Reagan's
idea of a great evening was going home, sitting in
front of the TV, watching in open hands or a
gun smoke, reading a little bit, and going to bed.
He wasn't out there dying to socialize with people. And
(19:05):
if he was in a party and didn't know anybody,
he would be the guy just standing after the side
waiting for somebody to talk to him. He was not
like a Bill Clinton type of glad hander and backslapper.
But when he had an audience and people listening to him,
he just became this unbelievably charismatic figure.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I remember seeing him as he walked up the stairs
to give the speech.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
He grew right, yeah, that's what Stu said.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, and you could see, well, in a sense, the actor.
I mean, he was an actor and that was a
big part of it.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, And a lot of people tended to denegrate him,
saying like, oh, he's just a guy who reads a teleprompter,
and he was very good at reading a teleprompter. But
it was way more than that, because it wasn't just
reading other people's thoughts. He was just a great person
in constructing the arguments and making the case himself. And
as Stu Spencer said to me again, one of my
best interview subjects. Stu said, Reagan was not just the
(20:01):
best speech giver that he knew, but also the best
speech writer. He was so good at constructing arguments, and
he often did it on the fly. For example. But
you might have been there at the seventy six Republican
Convention where he lost the nomination to Ford, and he
was sitting up on the raptors. I think it was
in Kansas City, and Ford says, from the stage, and
(20:22):
I like my good friend Ron Reagan to come down
here and say something. And he didn't have a prepared speech.
And as he was walking down, you know, from the
raptors through the hallways of the convention center, you know,
Nancy Reagan was saying to him, well, do you know
what you're going to say? And he said, oh, I'll
think of something. And he did have some general ideas,
but he didn't have a speech. He basically extemporized this
(20:43):
brilliant speech on the spot that made a lot of
delicates say like, wow, we nominated the wrong guy. This
guy is so much more articulate than the guy we
actually nominated.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
No, that's right. A good friend of mine said he
knew at the end of that talk that they nominated
the wrong guy. Tim Rusher met with the last day
he was in office and said, what do you think
it's true about you? That was not true but any
other president, And he said Reagan sat there for a
minute and he looked at him and said, I think
(21:13):
I'm the only one who knows what it's like to
be photographed from every angle. And Russell said it hit
him that Reagan was never off, and that when he
was with you, he was on. He may be off
when he's with Nancy, but otherwise when the minute he
walked out of that room, he was on all day,
every day.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, I know exactly. That reminds me of another one
of his famous quips, which is where he was asked
how could an actor be president? And his reply was,
he didn't understand how anybody but an actor could be president.
And he really understood that performative aspect of the presidency
in a way that very few others did. Like FDR
his boyhood, Idol did, JFK did, Reagan did, but very
(21:54):
few others understood how you had to carry yourself in
the public eye. And that's something that Reagan had off.
He'd been doing since his days as a sportscaster in
the Midwestern his nineteen twenty so he had been in
the public eye really his whole life and felt very
comfortable in that role.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
How much do you think growing up in a small
town in Illinois and then having his first job in
Des Moines, how much did all that do they shaped him?
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Oh, it was tremendously important, I think, And we tend
to think of Reagan as a Westerner because of course,
you know, he loved his ranch near Santa Barbara, and
he was governor of California, and he wore cowboy hats
and all the rest of it. But he was really
a Midwesterner. That's where he spent all of his formative
years up until his late twenties. He was really shaped
by this small town world in rural Illinois. We're moving
(22:43):
around from town to town because his father, Jack was
this alcoholic shoe salesman who kept losing one job after another,
and so you know, moving around with I think all
the strengths and weaknesses of that time and place. You know,
very very different America. I mean, he was born in
nineteen eleven, he grew up in the nineteen teens and twenties.
He was born at the end of the horse and
buggy age, and he was president in the nuclear age.
(23:04):
I mean, just an amazing amount of history occurred when
he was president. And Walt Disney later kind of mythologized
those small towns as main Street USA at Disneyland, But
Reagan lived on the actual Main Street USA, not in
the Disneyland attraction, but the actual one, and they were
to be sure. It wasn't all rosy, and he tended
to have very rose colored remembrances of his childhood and
(23:27):
blot it out, like the fact that his father was
this alcoholic, that there were all these personality conflicts between
mother and father, the fact that they were very poor
moving all the time, and also the towns they had
a lot of virtues, but they weren't ideal like I mean.
He always talked about kind of the self reliance he
was taught growing up in Dixon, Illinois, and how neighbors
love neighbors and worked together and a sense of community
(23:49):
and all that was very true, but there was also
a darker side to it. For example, I discovered that
the ku Klux Klan was very active in Dixon in
the nineteen twenties. They were marching through downtown in their
white sheets. So there was also that less admirable side
of reality. But he tended to focus on the positive
because that's kind of how he saw his whole life
and had really been taught by his mother to always
(24:11):
look on the sunny side of life. That was very
much his outlook in ways that often actually frustrated even
Nancy Reagan, who thought he was like being too Pollyannish,
too good natured, but that's kind of who he.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Was when you were doing the research. How many people
do you think he actually saved when he was a lifeguard?
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Oh, I think it was actually about seventy seven. I mean,
there are a lot of legends around Ronald Reagan and
some legends that he propagated himself, but that one I
think is actually reality. I mean, I think a lot
of cynics say, oh, you know that was exaggerated, or
you know, girls were just pretending to drown so they
could be saved by the handsome lifeguard. But I think
it's actually pretty well documented and he really did say
about seventy seven people, and he became a hometown hero
(24:53):
because of that. But actually, the most revealing comment he
ever made about his life guarding was something he said
to a movie fan magazine in the late thirties. And
as you know, Reagan was not a very self revealing
person and didn't really reflect much on himself in interviews.
But what he said I thought was very interesting, where
he said that he liked being a lifeguard because you know,
he was sitting up on that big stand and everybody
(25:13):
was looking up to him, he was the center of attention,
so he actually kind of liked being the center of attention.
I thought that was fascinating because he was such a
modest and self effacing guy. But that was giving you,
like the small peak of the ego that he actually
had within him, that what we all have really.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Lawrence Olivia was once asked why he became an actor,
and he said, look at me, look at me, look
at me, in a way replaing about Reagan.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
He liked the attention, Yes, yeah, And that's a little
bit paradoxical because again, he was much better than most
presidents at hiding it. I mean, some presidents their star
for attention and you can feel their neediness, and he
never felt needy. He always felt like he didn't really
need it. But it was also partly because he was
so used to attention. He was always, you know, in
the camera's eye, and that was kind of normality for him.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Will you write about Reagan's role during World War Two?
I was very struck when Chlis and I went to
the ranch where we were filming with Ronald Reagan Rendevoue Destiny,
And as I looked around at the ranch, first of all,
there's a picture of him in the last unit of
Horse Cavalry in the nineteen thirties, so he's in the rotc.
(26:39):
There's a book on his shelf which is the original
nineteen forty edition of Infantry a War, which was the
Doctor in Manual from Fort Bender, And it was clear
that he was serious. And yet when you get to
the war, he essentially stays home in uniform doing training films.
I'm curious how you parse all of that.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He was the beneficiary of some lobbying behind the scenes
by Warner Brothers, which his studio, which lobbied to keep
him out of uniform as long as possible because they
wanted to keep him making movies. And then when he
was called up, they basically pulled some strings and got
him assigned to this first motion picture unit of the
US Army Air Force, located in Culver City, California. And
(27:20):
so the justification for that was that he had very
poor eyesight. You know, his eyesight would keep him out
of combat, which was probably accurate, although there were certainly
examples of others who had physical issues who nevertheless actively
went out and sought combat. You think about John F. Kennedy,
for example, who had very bad back problems, but nevertheless
got himself assigned to pt boats in the Pacific. But
(27:43):
Reagan was basically content to spend the war in Culver City, California,
making training in propaganda films. And he certainly made a contribution.
And there was nothing dishonorable about what he did. I mean,
there were millions of service people who never went into combat,
and he was certainly one of those. He did his bit.
But I think the movie magazines gave kind of a
distorted impression of what he was up to, because when
(28:05):
he would show up at restaurants or bars, you know,
they would write stories about, you know, Ronnie Reagan back
from the front, making it seem like he was engaged
in combat. You know, he wasn't back from anywhere. He
was a mile down the street basically.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Well, he was in the screen Actors Guild. He encountered
real communists and it kind of shook him. And it's
sort of the beginning of the intensity of his out
of Communism. What did you discover?
Speaker 2 (28:31):
I think that's right. I mean, I think he started
moving to the right again. He was a guy who
was a very passionate New Deal Democrat. As he said
worshiped FDR Liberal Democrat. But then it started. I think
it was during the war years he started moving to
the right a little bit. He was as a highly
paid movie star, he was very unhappy about paying, you know,
ninety percent income tax rates. And he was also kind
(28:52):
of discussed with a lot of the feather bedding and
bureaucracy that he encountered in the War Department. But I
think he really began to make the transition in the
post war era, where as you know, his movie career
was waning, and so he devoted more of his time
to activism and to becoming a labor leader and eventually
president of the Screen Actors Guild. And so he wound
up in the middle of these battles over communism in Hollywood.
(29:15):
And you know, he testified before the House on American
Affairs Committee, he cooperated with the FBI, and he was
de facto helped to administer the Hollywood Blacklist, And he
was certainly battling some real communists in Hollywood. There were
certainly real communists in Hollywood. I think in hindsight, he
probably tended to exaggerate the threat a little bit, largely
(29:36):
based on what the FBI and others were telling him
because they were convinced that there was a made in
the Kremlin plot to take over Hollywood, which you know,
I didn't see a lot of evidence of. It would
have been very hard to pull up because, as David Niven,
I think, remarked, you know, the people who ran Hollywood,
there were like six of them, the studio bosses, and
they were all Republicans, So it'd be very hard to
take control of the studios for a communist. But that
(29:57):
was what Reagan believed, and it certainly kind of radicalizing
him and helping him to move away from the Democratic Party,
although he still remained a Democrat in the forties. And
I think he really only made the transition to being
a Conservato across the board, including on economic issues, in
the nineteen fifties when he became a spokesman for GE
and you know, host of General Electric Theater. And I
(30:19):
think that was a tremendously influential period because GE in
those days was a very conservative company and they thought
that providing conservative materials to their employees, they saw that
as kind of an investment against the union troubles. They
thought this was how they would prevent strikes and union
organizing by preaching the gospel the free market basically, and
Reagan imbibed all of that. And you know, he was
(30:40):
doing these long cross country train rights because he was
afraid of flying in those days, so he would take
the train from LA to New York and he would
have a lot of time to read. And you know,
he was a charter subscriber to National Review, and you
know he was reading Human Events, he was reading Hyak, Whitaker,
Chambers and all this other stuff. And so he really
became a thorough going conservative, I think in the nineteen fifties,
but the process really began in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So I was fascinated the book by Tom Evans called
The Education of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, that was a very useful book.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, I'd worked with Reagan. I first really met with
him in seventy four and obviously campaigned with him and
then served with him. I never fully understood how systematically
strategic he was until I read Evans' book and the
whole notion of what he called moving dm that if
you could get the American people to go with you,
(31:33):
their leadership had to follow, and had really explained a
great deal of what Reagan had done over the years. Now,
one of the great turning points, and I think totally unpredictable,
is that Goldwater basically get Reagan to give a speech
in October of sixty four as Goldwater is being drowned
(31:54):
by Johnson, and the speech, in a sense becomes more
important than the Goldwater campaign. Can you talk a little
bit about why did that happen and why was it
so impactful?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Well? Yes, but I mean I want to correct one
very small thing, because it wasn't Goldwater who got him
to give the speech. In fact, the Goldwater campaign was
quite resistant to Reagan giving that speech because they were
afraid that their candidate was going to be overshadowed by
Reagan and that Reagan would become the focus rather than Goldwater.
And it was really a bunch of the Republican donors
(32:26):
in LA who got together and put together the money
for Reagan to go on national TV and give this
half hour time for choosing speech on behalf of Goldwater.
And they had to really work on the Goldwater campaign,
and finally Bury Goldwater himself said okay, I'll give the
goal ahead. This makes sense to me. But it was
actually a selling job to get the Goldwater campaign to
do it. And I think part of that might have
(32:47):
been kind of the sense that Reagan was just, even
then in sixty four, when he'd never run for office,
he was actually a much more skilled orator and kind
of charismatic public figure than Barry Goldwater. And they campaign
together quite a bit, especially in California, and often. You know,
we were talking about this earlier with Ford, but it
was certainly true with Goldwater and Reagan in sixty four.
(33:09):
You know, people who heard them both on the stump
together would say, you know, gosh, I wish that Reagan
guy was the candidate instead of Goldwater, because, as you remember,
Goldwater was kind of a very hard edged conservative. He
was not warm and Cudley he was kind of a
castro oil conservative who would say, you know, take it
my way or the highway. Here it is, here's my message,
and you know, if you don't like it, you know,
(33:30):
take a hike. And that wasn't Reagan at all. I
ran across a wonderful quote from Joe Alsop or one
of the other columnists in the nineteen sixties watching Reagan
speak in this period and talking about how the Reagan
personality was like soothing, warm bathwater. He basically delivered the
same message as Goldwater, but he made it go down
much easier. He had a much more winning way of
(33:51):
delivering that conservative message, and he certainly did that in
the time for choosing speech which was nationally televised like
a couple of weeks before the sixty four and that
was later described as by David Broder and others as
being the most electric national political debut since William Jennings
Brian gave his Cross of gold speech. Goldwater, as we know,
(34:12):
went down in flames a few weeks later, but then
Conservatives and Republicans had a new champion, a new idol
to turn too, because Reagan was such an articulate champion
of their views.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I remember vividly that from that point on he was
a centerpiece. I followed in sixty five and sixty six's
campaign for governor and the whole emergency he ended up
I think it was in sixty five he ends up
in a television debate with Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, and cleans the floor with him.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
It was an insane debate as on foreign policy, and
you had to think either six or eight foreign students
asking questions that were inherently hostile to the United States,
And he have Kennedy who's torn because he really doesn't
want to be anti the student, but he really can't
be totally against the States, whereas Reagan's very comfortable. I
thought it was brilliant at the time. And supposedly Kennedy
(35:06):
turned and said to his staff afterwards, never ever again
put me on television with him, is impossible.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, Robert Kennedy was discovering what everybody would discover before
along that Reagan was one of the great masters of
the TV medium, really unrivaled among presidents, and you took
him on at your peril.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
What do you think of the lessons from Reagan's leadership
approach that could be applied today.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Well, I think one big one, which we were discussing earlier,
is the need for pragmatism and for centrism and for compromise.
I mean, Reagan often expressed his contempt for conservatives who
want to go over the cliff with their flags flying,
and that was the wording that he used, and he
often talked about how he'd rather get eighty percent of
he one today and come back for more tomorrow, rather
(35:52):
than you know, it's just one hundred percent and get nothing.
He had a very sure grasp of the possible in politics,
you know, I think he sort of had freedom to
make deals with Democrats because Conservatives never doubted that he
was with them in his heart and ideologically, And I
think I gave him actually a lot of maneuver room
that politicians like Bob Dole or George H. W. Bush
(36:12):
they didn't have because conservatives are always suspicious of them,
but Reagan they loved, and so that gave them the
freedom to actually be pragmatic and do things that conservatives
were often very critical of at the time. When we
forget this, Reagan was often criticized. I mean I even
ran across some very funny quotes from a state senator
who was a member of the John Birs Society in California,
who was suggesting that Reagan was a Democratic plant, he
(36:34):
was a false flag operative, that he was there to
undermine the Republican Party because this senator was so upset
at some of Reagan's deviations from conservative orthodoxy. But I
think that's why he became a successful governor and president,
was able ultimately to win forty nine states in nineteen
eighty four, which today seems like science fiction. I mean,
imagine any politician winning forty nine states today. Reagan did
(36:56):
it because he was able to reach out and work
across part of and lines and not to take an
absolutist or narrow ideological approach. And I think that's something
we could use a lot more of across our politics today.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Thanks. I want to thank you for joining me. Your
new book, Reagan, His Life and Legends is an amazing read.
It's available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, and
I strongly encourage our listeners who are fans of Ronald
Reagan to pick up a copy. They're going to learn
a lot about the man they never knew. And I
appreciate the hard work you've done.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be
on with you. What a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Thank you to my guest, Max Boot. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Reagan His Life
and Legend on our show page at neutworld dot com.
Neutworld is produced by Game of three sixty and iHeartMedia.
Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
(38:00):
Special thanks to the team at Ginglish three sixty. If
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(38:24):
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.